It Smells Holy Here

So today we had this huge cookout/fellowship meal at the church. It was awesome. Everyone brought their own food and a few guys broke out this super fat-daddy grill and started cookin’ it up. Brothers and sisters stood around eating, talking and laughing for an hour or so and then everyone packed up and headed to the house. After everyone left I turned out the lights, locked the doors, went home and just crashed for a while before heading back up to church for the high school Bible study. When I got here and got ready to unlock the door I was overwhelmed by the smell of grilled burgers… mmm. No one had been up here cooking for about three hours, but the smell of our cookout still dominated the air. After I unlocked the door, I walked in the building and was again bombarded with the smell of our cookout along with this outrageous desire to slam another burger! It was a fragrant reminder of the awesome fellowship we had together.

It has often struck me, when reading through the Old Testament accounts of sacrifice, just how much worship was a feast for the senses. You would hear the beat of the music alongside the bleating of lambs. You would feel the wool or the wine or grain in your fingers. You would see the flames and smoke of the altar alongside the multi-colored costumes of the priests and the arresting deep red of blood. If you were a priest, all these sacrifices became your meals… the taste of others’ offerings. And maybe more powerfully than any other, you would smell worship. It was like a never-ending barbeque with the aroma of beef, lamb, bread and wine constantly filling every corner of the temple or the tent. It was the height of hands-on drama and it must have been awesome. ‘Holy’ had a smell and it was delicious. It didn’t just feel good to make things right with God… it smelled good.

In 2 Corinthians 2 Paul says, “But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life…”

Holiness still has a smell. If we are offering our lives and hearts to Him, people will know it… just like the whole neighborhood knows on a bright summer day when one family breaks out the grill and throws on some burgers, people know when we smell like Him. Some folks don’t like it and some folks do, but when our lives are His, it’s fragrant to Him. Don’t you want to have a life that smells awesome to God? Don’t you want to have a life that makes people hungry for the Bread of Heaven?

Tomorrow the church won’t smell like burgers anymore… that is, unless I bust out that grill again and cook ‘em up! How’s your spiritual aroma? Is it time to get the fire going again? You can smell like Him. You can be fragrant. You can have a life that God loves to sniff and that others walk by and say, “Mmm… what is that?”